Of course we can start a new Nessus scan to detect vulnerable hosts. However, Nessus plugin for this particular vulnerability may be released with a big latency and you will not find this vulnerability in your scans. So, it’s may be faster just to search for detected Jira servers in available scan results using Splunk searching mechanism.

It’s no secret that task tracker is one of the most critical resources of any big organization. The whole working process can be represented as creating, processing and closing various tasks. Without task tracker there will be complete disaster, collapse and anarchy. So, it’s very important to work with this instrument efficiently. And when I write efficiently, I mean in automated way. It’s a blog about security automation after all. 😉

This post will be about Jira task tracker. I have already wrote how Jira can be used in VM Remediation process. That post was mainly about the main principles and how remediation tasks look in Jira WEB-GUI. Now, I will go further and show how to use it as a source of important information and easily deal with daily routine tasks using some trivial scripting. It is all possible because of advanced Jira Rest API.

Let’s say we have some regular tasks of some type. For example, to detect vulnerabilities on some hosts using Nessus and make a comment about founded vulnerabilities in the task. You can make a script that we will search for this kind of tasks in Jira, process them, add scan results to the comment and close the task. Of course it works the best when these tasks are also were created with in some automated way, in this case parsing will be much easier.

“Issue”, is the right name for the task in Jira; but I frequently use “issue”, “task” and “ticket” interchangeably. Sorry for this.

17-18 November I was at the great event —Zero Nights security conference in Moscow. For the first time as a speaker. Being a part of such famous and prestigious security event was very exciting. There were three of us, Ekaterina Pukhareva, Alex Smirnoff and me, and only 20 minutes available for all. I was talking mainly about VM solution problems and custom reporting/ticketing, Ekaterina shared some experience in using Tenable SecurityCenter for Vulnerability and Compliance management, and Alex was talking mainly about Asset and Risk Management.

Presentation was recorded and some time later video will be available on YouTube. However, I suppose audio will be only in Russian not earlier than February 2017. So I think it will be a much more useful to share some points of the presentation right now. Lucky here I don’t have any time restrictions. =)

The first thing to say about Vulnerability Scanners and Vulnerability Management product is that there are plenty of them. On this picture I mentioned some of the products/vendors.

Pros: it makes possible to implement any logic of remediation/patch management process.
Cons: you should make it by yourself; scripting skills and API knowledge required.

Tickets in buit-in remediation systems are usually assigned per host or per vulnerability. However, for large size networks making “one vulnerability on one host – one ticket” quickly become impractical. With universal task trackers we can do it in a different ways. I find it most convenient to make tickets on principle “one category of vulnerabilities, one ip range, one scanning iteration – one ticket”.Continue reading →

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